Random samples

劉方平Liu Fangping春怨Spring Heart-breakWith twilight passing her silken window,
She weeps alone in her chamber of gold
For spring is departing from a desolate garden, [...]

白居易Bai Juyi賦得古原草送別GrassesBoundless grasses over the plain
Come and go with every season;
Wildfire never quite consumes them – [...]

Introduction

« The Three Hundred Tang Poems (Tang shi sanbai shou, 唐詩三百首) were compiled by the Qing scholar Sun Zhu 孫洙, also called Hengtang Tuishi 衡塘退士 "Retired Master of Hengtang", and published in 1764. Sun was not very pleased with the poems of the anthology Qianjiashi 千家詩 "A thousand master's poems" (late Southern Song) because of its lack of educational spirit. His own compilation became so popular that it is enclosed in a corpus of books that are found in almost every household still today. Sun's intention was to elect poems that serve to cultivate the character of the reader. Today, there exist some new compositions of three hundred Tang poems containing different opera, because the Qing time attitude to poetry as educational instrument has changed until today. Sun Zhu has divided his anthology into six different styles, comprising old style poems (gushi, 古詩), regular poems (lüshi 律詩) and short poems (jueju, 絕句), both with five and seven syllable verses. Between the particular sections, poems in the style of the old Han Music Bureau (yuefu, 樂府) are inserted that were still in use during the Tang Dynasty but gradually lost their original character and disappeared during the latter half of Tang. » See Chinaknowledge's page about
poetry from Tang to Yuan.

Confer

Sources

Chinese text and Bynner English translation found at Chinese text initiative. Almost all the poems have been translated by Witter Bynner in The Jade Mountain: A Chinese Anthology (New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 1929).

桂花 (桂華) according to the 汉语大词典 is 木樨, Osmanthus fragrans from the family of Oleaceae (olive tree).
This sites dictionary and translation uses "cinnamonum cassia" which should actually be cinnamomum cassia 肉桂 (see. 21st century c.e. dictionary)

Thinking only of their vow that they would crush the Tartars- -
On the desert, clad in sable and silk, five thousand of them fell....
But arisen from their crumbling bones on the banks of the river at the border,
Dreams of them enter, like men alive, into rooms where their loves lie sleeping.

The above translation was embellished with some "poetic license".

Literally, the words meant:

Pledged to sweep the Xiong-nu away without fear for their own safety;
Five thousand clad in sable and brocade perished in the dust of Hu;
Pity the bones littering the banks of the Wu Ding River,
they were the very people dreamt of in ladies' bedchambers.